'We Pissed Them Off, They Pissed Us Off' MDC On Punk's Glory Days

Dave Dictor's got a set of balls on him. It'd be one thing to start a band called Millions Of Dead Cops in today's 'impossible to shock' musical environment. But doing this in 1981 – in Texas – and in the middle of Ronald Reagan's conservative revolution? As I said – dude's got balls.

“Yeah, we pissed a whole lot of people off,” admits Dictor, down a very dodgy phone line somewhere from the backwoods of Texas. “At the same time it was also very exciting because so many of us were restless and exploding inside. All these bands, Black Flag, Minor Threat, Dead Kennedys, Agnostic Front, D.O.A., us, Circle Jerks – so many others – were doing our thing because nothing around us in popular culture interested us.

"What we were doing was new and nobody quite got it – the music press ignored us and tried to keep that whole dinosaur, stadium rock thing going, but the hardcore movement just kept growing and growing. A lot us thought that something wasn't right in America at the time and we reacted against it in the only way we knew how.

“As for people hating the band because of its name – well just as we pissed them off, they pissed us off,” continues Dictor. “Down south in our neck of the woods you still had the Ku-Klux Clan who were viciously attacking Mexican farm workers and black churches. Basically they did what they wanted because they were aligned with the police – you'd even see them hanging out together. And of course the police at that time would often break up hardcore shows and just start beating people up for no reason.

"We were originally called The Stains but then we found out there was a band in Los Angeles with the same name – so we had to change it. Choosing a new name was a no brainer when you considered how the police of the time behaved.”

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